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Back to Infectious Disease Articles
Monday, 7 June 2004 05:30 PM GMT
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The new outbreak in Yambio has killed between 25 and 30 percent of the people
infected. The CDC had indicated that the outbreak is not linked to the known
strains of Ebola virus.
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Scientists at the World Health Organization suspect that a new
milder strain of the Ebola virus may have caused the latest outbreak of
the deadly hemorrhagic fever in southern Sudan.
10 people were infected
with the Ebola-like virus in Yambio, a Sudanese town near the
border with Congo. Four of them have already died.
U.S. Centers for Disease
Control in Atlanta indicated that the outbreak is not linked to the
known strains of Ebola-like viruses that cause the more severe viral
infection.
Ebola hemorrhagic fever
Ebola hemorrhagic fever (EHF; commonly referred to as simply Ebola)
is a recently identified, severe, often fatal infectious disease
occurring in humans and some primates caused by the
Ebola virus.
Ebola
was first discovered in 1976, and since its discovery, different
strands of the
Ebola virus have caused epidemics with 50 to 90 percent mortality
in Za?e, Gabon and Uganda.
Source: "Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever Table Showing Known Cases and
Outbreaks, in Chronological Order." Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. 18 October 2002.http://cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/spb/mnpages/dispages/ebotabl.htm.
Among humans, the virus is transmitted by direct contact with infected
body fluids such as blood. The incubation period of
Ebola hemorrhagic
fever varies from two days to four weeks. There are four known strains
of Ebola-like viruses, three of which cause the deadly disease, the CDC
said on its web site.
The Ebola virus is spread by contact with body fluids, including sweat
and saliva. Outbreaks of the disease are rare, and no one knows where
the virus lives when it is not infecting humans. The disease usually
kills its victims so fast that it also destroys the host for the
virus. The viruses are probably preserved in an undefined reservoir in
the rain forests of Africa
Symptoms are variable too, but the onset is usually sudden and characterized
by high fever, prostration, myalgia, arthralgia,
abdominal pains and
headache.
These symptoms progress to
vomiting,
diarrhea, oropharyngeal lesions,
conjunctivitis, organ damage (notably the kidney and liver) by co-localized
necrosis, proteinuria, and bleeding both internal and external, commonly
through the gastrointestinal tract. Death or recovery to convalescence
occurs within six to ten days.
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Outbreak in Yambio
The Ebola virus
involved in the latest outbreak could be a new virus. Scientists could
not match the known variants, so it could be a new variant. Genetic tests
are being conducted at the CDC in order to characterize and classify
the suspected new strain of the
Ebola virus.
The symptoms of the illness around Yambio include general malaise,
fever, vomiting blood and bloody diarrhea. The mortality of the
suspected new variant has killed between 25 and 30 percent of the
people infected, while other variants kill between 50 and 90 percent
of those who contract the disease.
Previous epidemics
The first recognized Ebola epidemic occurred almost simultaneously
in southern Sudan and in a nearby region of the Congo in 1976,
according to the CDC.
At the time, Ebola killed 117 of the 284 people who were reported with
the viral infection in southern Sudan. In Congo, it killed 280 of the
318 people infected.
In 2000, an Ebola outbreak killed 173 people in Gulu district in
northern Uganda, which also borders southern Sudan.
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